


.

by little_giddy



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 10:55:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_giddy/pseuds/little_giddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Lovely house in the middle of nowhere,’ she said bluntly. ‘Though this is a stupid idea.’ </p><p>‘As foolish as you’ve ever had, I’m sure. Pray inform me.’ </p><p>Elijah and Jenna.</p>
            </blockquote>





	.

The meeting had gone as well as any, considering the number of mortal enemies invited under one roof, and only Elena and the vampires remained. Elijah would have suggested that they all eat together to imply that murder was now impolite between company, but having shared in the Salvatore notion of hospitality once, he felt no need to remind the brothers of such trifling courtesies.    
  
‘No, I- this is -’    
  
Elijah turned his attention from the carvings (imitation, or at the very least heavily restored). Jenna Sommers looked from one of the brother hosts to the other, in the hopes of what, he did not know.    
  
She raised a head and took a steadying breath - a habit she would disregard if she survived a few decades, perhaps.  _Or a few weeks,_ Elijah thought.    
  
‘I’m a vampire now. Are you telling me I can’t help?’   
  
The glances the Salvatore brothers swapped were quickly executed. However, with her transition had come eyesight to keep up with such things, and Jenna followed the exchange.    
  
‘What aren’t you telling me?’ She tried for a disapproving look and gave up. ‘Look, you explained catching wildlife to me earlier, and blood banks yesterday. I’ll take dark truth over more awkward, thanks.’    
  
The blonde vampire, Elijah speculated. The one probably clever enough to survive, if she could forbear acquiring a werewolf attachment destined to failure. She would have the courage, at least, to explain this part of the new vampire’s existence. But hardly elegantly.    
  
‘What they are trying to say,’ Elijah found himself saying, ‘is that in terms of vampires, you are extremely - young.’    
  
‘Great, I get carded at the goth bars all over again. What next?’ Jenna’s eyes narrowed.    
  
‘And for vampires, age and strength are as one,’ he finished, watching her.   
  
She nodded and took another unnecessary breath. ‘You’re telling me I can’t help. Not much.’   
  
So very young, Elijah thought, nodding, to be sounding so old.   
  
\- - -    
  
Elijah returned across the intervening miles between the Salvatore boarding house and the foreclosure property. He’d seen and taken advantage of many recessions, but nowhere were they more profitable than in the United States, where they built with the illusion of everlasting space outside the cities, except Rome, which had suffered similar delusions.    
  
The werewolf’s return had prompted him to vacate the Lockwood mansion - it would have been a pointless argument, and one he may have once found diverting for a short while, but recent experiences had left him lacking in patience for such things.    
  
The foreclosure’s gardens were not up to the Lockwood lawns, however. Wild tangles of ivy reaching for what purchase decaying walls would allow, crumbling around the frames of the windows and tiles flying from the roof in high winds. He’d bought the colonial heap for a song at a property auction.     
  
He’d made little alteration to the exterior except to rip off some ostentatious figurines. The constant conflict between the date of construction built into the bones of the house and the era it sought to evoke gave him a headache. It could be worse, he’d told himself repeatedly. It could be Tudor Revival architecture again. Now that had been a trial.    
  
The interior remained its shabby self but for the kitchen (new fridge, freezer and microwave), one bedroom, and the library. Or what would have been a library, were it not a room heaped full of books Elijah had gathered from a few of his storehouses because they contained precious passages of information that might be of use. The fact that he or Klaus had written half of them was irrelevant.    
  
\- - -    
  
Just as Elijah was beginning to consider looking at the contraption of a mobile phone Elena had lumbered him with out of boredom, he heard a knock on the door.    
  
She had four bags in her hands, packed full, and another on her back, but stood as if they weighed nothing at all. Which they didn’t anymore. He found the fact easier to assimilate than those in her life would, he suspected, having watched people live, transition, die and die again more times than he cared to count.    
  
‘Lovely house in the middle of nowhere,’ she said bluntly. ‘Though this is a stupid idea.’    
  
‘As foolish as you’ve ever had, I’m sure. Pray inform me.’    
  
‘You have books. I have knowledge.’ She looked away, cringing. ‘And to my knowledge, you aren’t sleeping with anyone within reach of my newly-enhanced vampire hearing.’   
  
He laughed at that. What humans do not realise can be overheard was always one of the more uncomfortable realisations of the newly turned and one of the main reasons he preferred the country to the city. ‘You are aware I’m not to be trusted.’    
  
She threw her bags into the hallway behind him with a roll of her eyes. ‘Don’t teach your mother to suck eggs. Immortal ancient or whatever, I can tell that much just looking at you. You do have running water and electricity, right?’    
  
\- - -    
  
Elena arrived on schedule the next morning. Elijah had considered starting some kind of bet with Jenna as to who would attempt to convince her that her occupation of his space was a rotten idea and when, but he usually left that level of familiarity until he was sure he knew someone better. Say, a quarter of a century or so.     
  
If they’d had a bet, though, Elena would have been his.    
  
‘You know we can only trust him as far as he’s got something to gain here?’    
  
‘He has.’ Jenna faced down her niece. ‘An extremely capable researcher with vast local knowledge, who happens to know what’s going on. There’s only one of those around here.’    
  
‘Jenna, I don’t mean-’ Elena stopped.    
  
‘I know what you mean. And someone has to teach me how to do this, Elena, and you’d rather it was Damon? Or Caroline? Or Stefan? Don’t they have enough to protect or do already? Let me be of some use.’   
  
Elena looked up from Jenna to Elijah in the window above. The girl had damnably uncanny instincts, he’d grant her. She knew better than to name terms or threaten - the look was enough to warn him of Dire Consequences should anything happen to Jenna.    
  
It was a tiresome threat he could disregard easily enough, if he wanted to, but the part of Elena’s stubborn glance that said she was  _trusting him_ was harder to shake off.    
  
He’d always been a man of his word, and Jenna remained one of Elena’s loved ones, alive or not. Only a doppelganger, he thought, would have the arrogance to bind an Original with their own honour.    
  
\- - -    
  
Jenna raised an eyebrow as she blurred into focus in the kitchen. ‘You might want to go hunt or something. I’m fixing up a room for myself. I feel a domestic kick coming on.’    
  
Elijah cast a quick glance towards his books.    
  
‘Ha,’ Jenna said, ‘I said I’m fixing up a room  _for myself._ If you want the rest of this place done, I hope you’ve got a phone book in that pile.’    
  
And she was gone, moving faster than humans but slow enough that his eyes could follow her outline.    
  
\- - -    
  
Elijah settled with another volume of French medieval history, his reading about tourneys fought in the south punctuated by the splintering sound of wood and beat of hammers from upstairs. His research was less serious than usual: he was convinced Klaus had participated in tourneys as a mystery knight and meant to catch him in the act, centuries later. Its only serious purpose was in striking another thing from the long list of things he’d never known about his brother as his companion of millenia.    
  
‘Done!’ came the shout in the early hours of the morning. ‘I’ll stop inducing headaches now.’    
  
‘I picked one with an en suite.’    
  
He looked up. Why she thought he would be interested-   
  
‘Do you have a phone book? Internet? Because it turns out being a vampire doesn’t make you a plumber.’    
  
\- - -    
  
It had been three weeks since Jenna’s transition. She was right on time for extreme character traits - fits of nightmares about her wards that he didn’t mention overhearing, a whole week where she would not respond to words if they weren’t on paper, as if she could research the logic behind Klaus’s choice of sacrifice. Finally, she drifted back to the wreck of a house in torn clothes, smelling of bad whiskey and human sweat but not human blood, just as he was wondering how he was going to phrase her disappearance to Elena. For a former diplomatic envoy, he sensed it would not go well.    
  
‘Clubs,’ she said from an armchair in the dust-covered parlour by the kitchen. ‘I used to like dancing.’   
  
He could imagine that. He threw her a blood bag. ‘And now?’   
  
She looked up with eyes that were constantly pinpricks, now they needed so little light to be fully saturated with it. ‘Too slow. Too loud. Weirded out.’ She opened the top and blinked, veins appearing around her eyes. ‘I had to find out if I could not-’   
  
This one, Elijah allowed himself to think, might survive.    
  
\- - -    
  
‘Oh God, what- but-’   
  
Even vampires could pass out from exertion surpassing supply, and even vampires, Jenna was discovering, could encounter a phenomenon akin to that which humans called a hangover, when filling their veins with human poisons and not blood for long enough. For a young vampire still riding the final waves of the change, he calculated, four days of revelry would more than suffice.    
  
Elijah elected not to go to the kitchen then.    
  
‘Ric, what are you-’   
  
That roused him. He moved to the top of the stairs, where he could see Jenna half hanging out of a window below.    
  
Alaric stood twenty feet away, crossbow at his side and unloaded.    
  
‘I followed you to the clubs. Just in case.’    
  
He turned and walked away, Jenna not making a move to cut him off.    
  
‘In case of what?’ Jenna said quietly, frowning into the distance. ‘In case I turned out like Isobel after all?’    
  
‘I think he meant my brother and his underlings rather than his former wife.’ Elijah walked down the stairs.    
  
‘Maybe,’ Jenna answered, ‘but I don’t suppose it matters now. Two vampire women is too many for even him.’    
  
\- - -   
  
He’d long made it a policy not to adopt changelings, humans or sundry supernaturals for roughly five hundred years (1492, but he wasn’t counting). Hence, he’d no idea what madness had taken him to amuse her by pointing out the existence of the microwave after Alaric’s back had faded into the horizon and she’d excused herself for a shower.     
  
’If it must be from a bag, at least it can be heated.’   
  
‘Like hot chocolate for vampires? Curl up with a book and a warm bag of blood?’   
  
He gave her a look but found himself amused. ‘I believe humans subscribe to the view that beer tastes differently in a metal can than in cold glass. I would recommend a mug for blood over a plastic bag.’   
  
She took the mug suspiciously. ‘And now do I add vervain for seasoning?’    
  
‘If you like your drink very spiced and your mind your own. I doubt it will improve the taste.’ He tilted his head as she added dried vervain from a jar on the spice rack - the only jar on the spice rack. ‘Do you believe another vampire will attempt to compel you?’   
  
It was a loaded question and they both knew it. Jenna took a drink from the mug and winced. ‘Okay, medicine done for the day. Pass me the shredded wheat.’    
  
Elijah tried not to gag as he watched her crush up the cereal into the mug.    
  
‘Hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.’ Jenna said without looking up. ‘I can feel the glare, buddy.’    
  
‘I assume you saw this on television.’    
  
‘For once,’ she grinned, heading to the kitchen door, ‘you’re actually right to say that.’ She paused and looked back over her shoulder to gesture to the small bottle of dried vervain. ‘The only way Klaus is getting me back in that ritual is more dead than undead.’    
  
Elijah could respect that.    
  
\- - -    



End file.
